“The Pope and others in the Church are not telling the truth about Islam. Some think they are doing so deliberately as part of a strategy to prevent further radicalization. Some (myself included) think they are doing so out of sheer naïveté. In either case, if they continue to defend Islam as a peaceful religion, it is bound to result in a crisis of trust and a crisis of faith.”

I think they are doing this out of a false and misguided understanding of Christian charity that is so welcoming to “the stranger” that it won’t stop welcoming him even at the point of civilizational suicide. This foolishness combined with the globalist agenda of the political and media elites has the Church and the West in the fix they’re in. As millions of Muslims stream into Europe, and mainstream politicians and the Church demonize opposition to this suicidal madness as “hatred” and “bigotry,” millions of Christians stream out of the Church that has abandoned them, and the free world, at the hour of greatest need.

“#NotMyPope.” In the wake of Pope Francis’ equivocal response to the murder of a French priest by two Islamic jihadists, that’s the top trending hashtag in France and in Belgium.

Which raises a question: Is the Pope doing more harm than good by continuing to deny—in the face of a mountain of evidence—that Islam has anything to do with violence?

As I’ve noted several times in the past, the Church’s handling of the Islamic crisis may prove to be far more scandalous than its handling of the sex abuse crisis. The main scandal surrounding the revelation of priestly sex abuse was that it was covered up for a very long time by priests, pastors, and even bishops. By their silence, many Church officials were, in effect, denying that there was a serious problem. The effect on Catholic morale was profound. In those places which were most seriously affected by the scandals, such as Massachusetts and Ireland, church attendance dropped off dramatically. Disaffected Catholics didn’t necessarily lose their faith in God but they did lose faith in the Catholic Church.

The Church’s handling of the numerous cases of “Islamic abuse” has the potential for causing a greater scandal. The similarities are striking. Once again we have Church leaders who deny that there is any serious problem. This can be seen, for example, in Pope Francis’ repeated assurances that Islamic violence is the work of “a small group of fundamentalists” who, according to him, don’t have anything to do with Islam. And once again, we have a cover-up—this time of the aggressive nature of Islam. After every terrorist incident, the Pope or some Vatican spokesman leaps to the defense of Islam lest anyone get the idea that there is a link between Islam and violence.

This is sometimes done by denying that terrorist groups or individual jihadists are motivated by religious beliefs (despite voluminous evidence that they are). Sometimes it is done by drawing a moral equivalence between Islam and other religions. Recently, when asked why he did not speak of Islamic violence, the Pope replied that “If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence.” Of course, it’s a false comparison. When Catholics commit violence they do not do so in the name of their religion, but in violation of it. Most people realize that there is an enormous difference between the Catholic “who has murdered his girlfriend,” and the jihadist who slits a priest’s throat while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

And that’s the problem. More and more people can see that what the Pope and others in the hierarchy are saying about Islam and Islamic violence doesn’t comport with reality. If things continue in this direction, it will generate an enormous crisis of confidence in the Church. It is potentially a crisis of much great proportion than the sex abuse scandals. This time the victims of the cover-up will be counted not in the thousands, but in the tens of millions. And this time we will be talking not about damaged lives, but about dead bodies.

Millions of Christians in the Middle East and Africa are already dead as a result of jihad violence, and millions more have been forced to flee their homes (see here and here). It’s estimated that some two million were killed by Muslims in Sudan alone between 1983 and 1995. Many of the victims were completely unprepared because they had been assured by Church leaders that Islam is a peaceful religion just like Christianity or Judaism. In Europe, millions more are threatened by an influx of Muslim migrants—a migration that many Church authorities have encouraged. As Robert Spencer put it in a recent column, “The Pope is betraying the Christians of the Middle East and the world, and all the victims of jihad violence, by repeating palpable falsehoods about the motivating ideology of attacks upon them.” Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop of Aleppo, said something similar last year when he criticized his brother bishops in France for ignoring the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians. He castigated them for being uninformed and in thrall to political correctness.

The Pope and others in the Church are not telling the truth about Islam. Some think they are doing so deliberately as part of a strategy to prevent further radicalization. Some (myself included) think they are doing so out of sheer naïveté. In either case, if they continue to defend Islam as a peaceful religion, it is bound to result in a crisis of trust and a crisis of faith….